U.S. PIRG Consumer Blog

• Consumers Union buys "snarky" Consumerist blog
  

  Recent Consumerist blog headlines:

• Target "Not Responsible" For Flying Carts of Doom
• Ex-TV Service Installer Explains It All, Tells You How to Fight Back
• The 15 Grossest Stories We've Posted On Consumerist This Year
• Always Check the (Sometimes Sketchy) Expiration Dates on Food.

  While you watched all your other magazines go out of business or shrink pages over the last several years, our colleagues at Consumers Union and its flagship Consumer Reports Magazine have quietly grown while successfully monetizing the net. That's something even the New York Times, Rupert Murdoch, and the Wall Street Journal (both before and after Rupertization) have failed to do.

  Now, CU has announced purchase of The Consumerist, a feisty blog that rips unfair and downright sleazy business practices while offering consumer tips. From the New York Times story by Stephanie Clifford: The blog offers consumer tips, like how to return products and how to confound a telemarketer, and covers shopper complaints, like excessive retail markups. It will become part of a new division of Consumers Union, and the current editors will remain. [...] Consumerist’s voice is younger, too: contributors write in the arch tone that is a hallmark of Gawker sites. But Consumers Union’s executive vice president, John Sateja, said that was not at odds with the more serious voice of Consumer Reports. “When Consumers Union was formed, it was a pretty snarky, aggressive organization that took on big organizations just like Consumerist is doing today; it’s just going to an audience that we basically don’t reach,” Mr. Sateja said. “It may not be language, or voice or style that Consumers Union has, in recent years, become accustomed to, but it is part of the roots of the organization.” I like The Consumerist, and CU will be smart, very smart, to keep it edgy and snarky.

• Connecticut AG Blumenthal to settle gift card ripoff suit with recalcitrant mall owner Simon
  Attorney General Richard Blumenthal today announced that the owners of the Crystal Mall in Waterford will pay $308,736 -- mostly for refunds to thousands of consumers -- to settle allegations that they violated the state ban on gift card inactivity fees. Norwich (CT) Bulletin. Along with the Consumers Union and others (previous blog), we have been fighting against the incredibly shrinking gift card--laden with fees and even subject to losses due to retailer bankruptcies. Give your nephew a card worth $50, and each month after the first year it declines by $2.50, just like a low-balance bank account, unless subject to stronger state law (Consumers Union list). While the settlement is important for its restitution to aggrieved consumers, Blumenthal's release notes that with the blessing of the pliant Treasury agency known as the OCC (our archival site OCCWatch), which allows its regulated national banks to charge any and all fees, mall owners such as Simon are now using a loophole and issuing gift cards under cover of a national bank charter:
• CPSC proposes variety of lead exceptions for comment
  

  The Bush Administration has become notorious for issuing rules and releases late on Fridays, hoping to miss the news cycles. The CPSC may have reached a new nadir when it issued several proposals for comment late Wednesday, December 24th, or Christmas Eve.

  The proposals address various testing requirements and possible exceptions to the 2008 Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act's limits on lead in toys and children's products. (One more on lead was added today.) With the filing of a multi-association petition to the CPSC seeking lead rule delays and exceptions, along with the appearance on the scene of a grassroots effort by "small" toy companies, attacking the new act's tough limits on toxic lead seems to be at the center of industry's strategy to gut the new law's protections. Washington Post last week. CQ story today.

• Will computerized health records protect privacy?
  

  Today's New York Times story by Steve Lohr Health Care That Puts a Computer on the Team extols all of the purported virtues of health information technology and some of the challenges in making it work. Incredibly, the story fails to discuss its biggest challenge--privacy. The phalanx of powerful special interests and beltway bandits sweeping along well-intentioned medical and research organizations to help them push Congress to spend big on computerized health records has so far failed to ensure adequate privacy guarantees. When consent is granted virtually automatically, as it will be in these systems, privacy is at risk. Congress must go further to ensure that computerization of health records doesn't represent the death of privacy protection. For more information worldprivacyforum.org

• Noted: Bush pardons real estate scammer NOT
  

  UPDATE: More from the NYTimes story on Christmas Day. From the New York Times City Room blog: Updated, 6:27 p.m. In an unusual move, President Bush on Wednesday reversed his decision, announced a day earlier, to pardon Isaac R. Toussie, a Brooklyn developer who pleaded guilty to fraudulently obtaining federally insured mortgages and to defrauding Suffolk County, N.Y., by selling it overpriced land.

  Original post: From Newsday: Bush pardons man involved in Suffolk real estate scam. Isaac Robert Toussie, the Brooklyn developer who served time in prison for masterminding a massive Suffolk real estate scam, was pardoned Tuesday by President George W. Bush, effectively wiping his criminal record clean. [...] Toussie pleaded guilty to charges in two separate cases. In one, he admitted in 2001 that he had made false statements to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, pleading guilty to a count of falsifying loan documents that illegally qualified about 100 home buyers for the HUD-backed mortgages.

• Release: Criticizes midnight regulation on toll roads
  

  U.S. PIRG's senior tax and budget analyst Phineas Baxandall, Ph.D., has issued a release harshly critical of the Bush administration's latest midnight regulation: New Federal Rule Requires Public Toll Roads to Mimic Profit Motives of Private Companies. Excerpt: Last week a little-noticed action was published in the Federal Register that will make it difficult over time for states to keep their toll roads public or to operate them differently from private toll roads.[...] “This is a truly radical rule that sets a dangerous precedent,” said Baxandall. Full release follows after the jump:

• Release on new Fed overdraft proposal
  

  As part of their new credit card rules approved last week making certain unfair practices illegal, the regulators had also intended to finalize an additional -- quite weak -- rule regulating the lucrative "bounce protection" programs that banks have used to collect billions in overdraft fees. While the regulators did at the same time as they approved the credit card rules, withdraw their mediocre overdraft rule, what they ended up doing is weak also. We joined other lead